As one of the several individuals who were engaged in a public shouting match about the impropriety of setting up bloggers as shills for products, I read with some amusement Robin Good's recent piece on the Marqui deal, which Marc Cantor set up to do just that.

Robin Good

[from Paid Assignment Is Here: Marqui Ignites "Bloggers Paid To Blog" Initiative ]

The opportunity to verify whether me, Marc Canter and those few others are really out of our minds is becoming areality.

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The idea of paying bloggers is a controversial one, as it challenges some of the sacred cows of the journalistic publishing business.
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I am personally enthusiastic about this now official announcement and while I don't know if I will be selected as a possible contributor to this I felt compelled to republish here the key parts of this historical opportunity.

Marqui, with the help of Marc Canter has published both an exhaustive and fascinating FAQ as well as the Terms of Contract for this revolutionary involvement of bloggers in the creation of new conversations around products and services.

Bloggers are not paid by Marqui to write good things about their products, but simply to write and report freely about their own views on them.

I think that if you read closely the following excerpts from Marqui's blogosphere initiative official FAQ and to the key parts I have extracted from the official contractual terms you can better appreciate the unique ethical spirit of this effort and why some of us think this is really going to rock.

There is something interesting in here, but it is interesting in the same way product placements in TV or movies are: when Matt Damon is swilling down a Hieneken, you always wonder if it is being paid for, or is it just random.

Now, when you are reading some shill blogger of the future, will you have to read the dozens of potentially complex and conflicting provisos and disclosures in order to determine whether the blogger is saying something for cash or not?

This treads on the other side of a line that I think shouldn't be crossed, and I think that readers will stay away in droves.

Note that we are experimenting with some novel sponsorship relationships at Corante, such as the Zero Degrees sponsored Operating Manual for Social Tools project. We thought that the relationship between the contributors there and Zero Degrees had to be carefully explained in a disclosure, so we created one. But in that case we are not being paid to mention Zero Degrees, and we have no incentives based on click throughs or sales.

That aspect of the Marqui deal is what unnerves me about it. A blogger (notwithstanding the disclosure of the relationship) writes a sentence about Marqui, or other subsidized products, right in the flow of his/her opining about technology, or communication, or whatever, and gets compensated for each click that leads to a sale. This is basically turning blogs into nothing more than those aggregated websites slapped together by affiliate marketing folks. No offense; they may serve a purpose, and people may find them useful to search for various products, but they are not serving the same purpose as blogs. And candidly I believe that they are less worthy of attention.

So, in the final analysis, the Marqui experiment is not necessarily evil, and I don't think it threatens to revolutionize social media. Its just another proof that companies are willing to pay for clicks or eyeballs, and if some group of people decide to use their blogs as affiliate marketing websites, then we will all have to learn how to differentiate those from other, unaffiliated blogs.

Note: I am not a purist who turns away from ads. On the contrary. But I think there needs to be a clear separation from content and commerce. I don't say good things about Silkroad just because they are sponsoring my blog and the True Voice seminar series. Their ad occupies the upper right rectangle on the blog, and by all means, click through sometime and see what they have to offer. And if they don't get enough traffic, I am sure that they will put their ad dollars elsewhere. But I am not being paid to write about Silkblogs once per week. And that distinction, although nuanced, is important.